NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3708, 25 October 1927, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

A duck at Appledore, Kent, has laid a black egg. An electric treadmill for exercising dogs has been invented. Granite is the lowest rock in the earth’s crust. It is the bed rock of the world. Hugh Gotobed was the name of a child christened at Cleethorpe, England, a few week ago. For the first time in 200 yaers parts of Westminster Abbey are being thoroughly cleaned. More than 45 per cent, of the windmills of Holland have been removed or demolished since 1926. A baby rabbit at Adlington, in Lancashire, has a South African wild cat as its foster-mother. The Bath motor-buses are to carry iron mallets for breaking the rear windows in cases of emergeney.

The highest railway in the world was inaugurated by the opening of the railway up Mount Blane. In the new design for the money of the Irish Free State appear a hen, a sow, a hare, and a salmon. The Pacific Ocean is larger in area than the total expanse of all the continents and islands on the globe. Nearly 200 British educators have attended an Education Conference at Locarno at which 38 countries were represented.

A new mountain railway has just been opened, reaching a height of 8000 feet, in the Aiguille du Midi, above Chamonix.

A potato with a sprout 8 feet long has been found in a dark cellar in Coningsby, Lindolnshire. It was entirely without soil. Cheques bring an annual revenue of about £3,000,000 to the British Treasury through the twopenny stamps they bear.

School children are both taller {ind heavier now than ever before, according to an English medical officer of health.

The vocal chords of women being shorter than those of men, less energy is required for a woman to talk than for a man.

Forty passengers were formed into boy scouts and girl guides during the Suevic’s voyage to England, from Australia and the Cape.

As 400 calls were made every day, Scotland Yard has had to refuse to receive telephone messages dealing with lost property. A thrush built a nest, in which it laid five eggs, on the brake handle of a goods waggon standing in a Lincolnshire railway siding. The record life for a hen, 19 years, has been broken by a Dorchester hen, which has died at 21. It was laying well till last year. ■ A wall-painting by a monk of the Middle Ages has been found dur- , ing alterations at the White Swan . Hotel, Stratford-on-Avon. The Fascist Party, with the help of the Italian Government and other societies, has sent 300,000 poor children for a summer holiday. The Eskimos of Northern Cani ada, instead of huddling at night in their igloos, congregate at the Government posts to hear wireless , concerts.

The Manx language is dying out. The number of Manxland residents who can speak the language has dropped from 4657 to 915 in 20 years.

The famous wardrobe in which Private Fowler was hidden for four years during the war is now being exhibited at the Imperial War Museum.

A loud speaker has been used successfully as a scarecrow in South Germany, where a fruitgrower suffered severe losses from feathered thieves.

Enfield’s death rate for 1926 was 10.05 the lowest recorded in Britain. Seventy-one deaths registered in the district were of people over 80 years of age. One was 102. Appendicitis is an older disease than most people imagine. Although it only received this name in 1886, (medical authorities have traced cases as long ago as 1684.

From the point of vie\v of marrage, the period from July to September is most popular, October to December coming second and the first quarter of the year a bad fourth.

Tiny electric light bulbs are mounted on the shafts of the new est surgeon’s instruments. 11 e the surgeon is performing an op eration, the lamp directs a tiny circle of light into the wound.

The British expenditure £° r war pensions, reckoned per head o e population, is 50 per cent, aiger than that of any other nation, anci more than three times as much as America’s. . , . m If the water were drained irom all the Pacific' the descent from the present shore line to the floor o

the deepest valley would be greater i'than the present acsent to the lof- j tiest Himalayan peak. j There is a strange clock in the Polytechnic Institute at Zurich, I, Switzerland. It never needs to be j, wound, but is run by a mechanism ! set in motion every time the tem- ! peraturo changes two degrees, i » and good ! advice, such as “Liberty is the right | to do everything which is not con- ! trary to the rights of others,” are \ printed on the backs of the tram | tickets used in Marseilles. Holland has the lowest death-rate 9.8 per thousand—in Europe, with Norway second and England and .Wales third. France, with 17.5 per ' thousand, has the highest. Russia’s figures are not given. . , Cosmetics, including sticks of graphite, possibly used as eyebrow pencils, lumps of -ochre, and reeepi tacles containing rouge, used by , “beauties” of 25,000 yeai’s ago, have been found during excavation * in Lower Austria.